Dave Ketchum wrote:
If a method is "good enough" to select a single winner in the general election, then it must be good enough, and most logical choice, for use in related primaries.
It does not follow. An general election is a method the government uses to try to find a candidate who best represents the voters. A primary election is a method a party uses to pick its candidate for a general election -- NOT simply to find the candidate who best represents the party's voters. These two goals can be the same, but it does not logically follow.
Perhaps I live in an odd state, but New York's Board of Elections DOES our elections.
I imagine this is common, but they are really doing the primary on behalf of the party. The party could decide to not have a primary, just as the state could decide to not do the party the favor of administering it.
Anyway, big deal is that it is good for the voters to understand the method used, and that is more practical if both elections use the same method.
Probably true, but as I said before I wouldn't mind multiple winners, and the goals of the elections are not exactly the same.
I would make one exception. If the general election is stuck with an outdated method, and a party is willing and able to move ahead - let it. This could encourage updating the general election method.
As I implied above, I don't think that the government has a right to tell parties how to run their primaries. They could provide very strong incentives (free air time, use of public polling equipment, et cetera) but fundamentally these are private organizations. If a party wants to decide its candidate by plurality or IRV or salic primogeniture (first born son of the previous nominee) then they should be free to do so.
I do not see where I gave you an excuse for this paragraph.
Well, when you said, "[If] a party is willing and able to move ahead - let it", that implied to me that you thought the government had the right to not let them.
Puzzle: Assuming the above leads to Condorcet in the primary, to select two candidates for the general election - WHY NOT? the arguments are not necessarily the same as related to electing two officers for PR.
Not necessarily, sure, but I don't think that Condorcet is clearly the best method to elect two candidates. It seems likely that it would end up picking two candidates from the center of a party, and nobody from a wing (think Kerry and Edwards, in stead of Kerry and Dean). But there have been some stabs taken at Condorcet-flavored proportional representation. The best attempt is probably this one:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/10308
It's pretty complicated, but worth the read. Try to sell that to the public, though...
As I said above, we are not doing PR, so almost certainly would not find such complication worth the pain.
Probably not, but this does not imply that pure iterative single-winner is the best approach, either. A good compromise (in my opinion) would be the sequential variant of the method described in the link. So, first you find the CW, then you find the best two-candidate slate with the CW in it, then you find the best three-candidate slate with those two candidates in it, and so on until you've generated as much of the order as you need.
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